1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to temperature regulators for regulating the temperature of batteries. More particularly, the invention relates to a temperature regulator for regulating the temperature of a battery in a motor vehicle, which has a temperature sensor suitably arranged in the battery.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, high-output and high-energy capacity batteries, for example lithium batteries and nickel batteries, have been put to practical use as a driving source of motor vehicles. Such batteries generally each include an electrode body, a pair of terminals, and a casing, and are assembled together to form a battery pack.
When the battery pack is used as a driving source of a motor vehicle, it repeats intensive charge/discharge. As a result, the temperature of the battery pack will increase due to heat generated by the electrode bodies of the batteries with chemical reactions taking place therein, lowering the performance of the batteries.
To solve, the above problem, Japanese Patent First Publication No. 2002-56904 discloses a battery pack which is configured with a plurality of batteries and a heat dissipating plate that is fixed to the terminals of the batteries. With this configuration, the heat generated by the electrode bodies of the batteries during operation can be dissipated, via the terminals and heat dissipating plate, to the atmosphere surrounding the battery pack. Consequently, it is possible to suppress the temperature of the battery pack from increasing.
Moreover, for the above battery pack, it is also possible to send cooling air to the heat dissipating plate, thereby further effectively suppressing the temperature of the battery pack from increasing. Furthermore, it is possible to employ a temperature sensor to sense the temperature of one of the batteries of the battery pack and control the flow rate of the cooling air based on the temperature sensed by the temperature sensor, thereby regulating the temperature of the battery pack to fall within a predetermined range. Here, the predetermined range is a range within which the performance of the batteries can be kept sufficiently high.
However, in the above case, if the temperature sensor is not suitably arranged in the battery pack, it cannot accurately sense the temperature of the battery, more specifically, the temperature of the electrode body of the battery due to the influence of the cooling air. As a result, it is necessary to perform a complicated correction process for the temperature sensed by the temperature sensor so as to correctly estimate the actual temperature of the electrode body.